Families who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001, are demanding that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani be kept away from the 25th anniversary remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero this fall. A petition organized by Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was killed in the attacks, asks the National September 11 Memorial & Museum to reconsider inviting Mamdani, citing what the families describe as a pattern of associations and public positions that conflict with the solemn purpose of the day.
Mamdani says he plans to show up anyway.
The petition, hosted on Change.org, has drawn more than 1,100 signatures in just over a week, including at least 300 from victims’ family members, the New York Post reported. That number is growing. Newsmax reported that organizers are targeting over 14,000 signatures. The families’ message is direct: the man who leads New York City should not stand at Ground Zero if his record suggests he does not share the values the ceremony exists to honor.
The petition does not call Mamdani names. It does not traffic in partisan overreach. It asks a pointed question and lets the mayor’s own record supply the answer.
“Concerns have been raised about Mr. Mamdani’s public positions, associations, and responses to rhetoric that many perceive as hostile to these shared values,” the petition states. “Given these concerns, we respectfully ask that the organizers carefully consider whether Mr. Mamdani’s participation would align with the intention of the ceremony and the expectations of the families most directly affected by the tragedy.”
The families laid out specific grievances. Among them: Mamdani’s perceived reluctance to condemn “globalize the intifada,” a slogan associated with calls for violence against Jews; his appearance during his campaign at the At-Taqwa mosque in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where imam Siraj Wahhaj, born Jeffrey Kearse, once hosted the Blind Sheikh, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; and Mamdani’s hiring of Ramzi Kassem, an attorney who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees, as the city’s chief counsel.
Then there is the matter of Mamdani’s father. Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University government professor, authored a book titled “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror” shortly after the September 11 attacks. Fox News Digital reported that the book argued suicide bombers should be “understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism” and included a passage arguing moral equivalency between the United States and Al Qaeda. When that passage resurfaced in 2025, prominent New York billionaire Bill Ackman posted on X: “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, published a 2025 press release outlining Mamdani’s association with Wahhaj, noting the imam’s ties to the 1993 bombing mastermind and his statements about jihad.
For the families, the stakes are personal in a way that no policy debate can capture. The petition makes that plain:
“For 9/11 families, this is not simply a public ceremony, it is a deeply personal day of mourning. The presence of individuals whose words or associations are perceived as conflicting with the solemn purpose of the event risks detracting from that focus and causing additional pain.”
Giovanni Galante told the New York Post the families’ position in even sharper terms: “This day is sacred to us. It is not political, and it is not a platform for those connected to such views. His presence would be deeply hurtful and inappropriate, like an unwelcome guest at a deeply personal ceremony.”
Galante’s wife Grace never came home from the World Trade Center. He has spent a quarter-century mourning her. The idea that the man who now occupies City Hall could stand at Ground Zero despite his associations with figures who have minimized or defended the very attacks that killed Grace, that is what drove Galante to launch the petition.
Mamdani is not the only figure in his political orbit to generate this kind of backlash. The mayor supported candidates described by the families as holding views hostile to American values, including Darializa Chevalier, a DSA-endorsed candidate who defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in Washington Heights. Chevalier once tweeted that she wiped soiled hands on an American flag after running out of napkins. This pattern of Democratic socialist figures with inflammatory records drawing organized public opposition has become a recurring feature of New York politics.
At an unrelated press conference on Monday, Mamdani made clear he has no intention of staying away.
“I will proudly honor families the survivors the first resp forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day…”
His spokesperson, Jeremy Edwards, echoed the sentiment, telling reporters that “Mayor Mamdani will proudly honor the families, survivors and first responders forever impacted by these devastating attacks by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 Commemoration.” Fox News Digital reached out to both the mayor and his father for comment; the mayor did not immediately respond.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which organizes the annual ceremony where the names of 2,977 victims are read aloud by their families, issued a careful statement. A spokesperson said the institution bears “the solemn responsibility of leading the nation in commemorating September 11, 2001, and honoring the 2,977 victims killed as their names are read aloud by their families.”
The spokesperson added: “We have intentionally worked to keep the commemoration free of politics because remembering those we lost on 9/11 should never be a partisan issue.” Government officials “from across the political spectrum, including every sitting president, governor, and mayor since 9/11, have attended the ceremony simply to bear witness, they do not deliver remarks and are asked to remain in a designated area.”
That standing policy is the museum’s shield. Every sitting mayor has attended since 2001, Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and their successors. Former Sen. Hillary Clinton has attended. City Council Speaker Julie Menin has attended. An unnamed organizer noted these dignitaries “have all been involved in the healing process for years.” But none of those officials carried the specific baggage the families now attribute to Mamdani.
The museum has not announced any decision on whether to change its policy or exclude the mayor. Whether it will break precedent remains an open question, one the families intend to force.
The petition arrives at a moment when Mamdani is already facing sustained criticism on multiple fronts. His administration has drawn public anger over a series of polarizing moves, including a directive urging New Yorkers to keep thermostats at 78 degrees during a brutal heat dome and a decision to make the city’s cash-for-syringes program permanent.
Rep. Randy Fine, R-Florida, and radio host Sidney Rosenberg have both publicly called Mamdani a “terrorist”, a characterization that, whatever one thinks of its precision, reflects the intensity of the opposition the mayor has generated. The rhetoric has escalated well beyond the usual partisan friction that attends any New York mayor.
Mamdani’s record on policy has also raised eyebrows. His administration announced plans for five city-owned grocery stores offering 30 percent discounts on produce, meat, bread, and milk, the kind of government-run retail experiment that fits a pattern of expanding city control over services traditionally left to the private sector.
But the 9/11 petition is different from a policy fight. Policy disagreements are the normal friction of democratic life. What the families are describing is something more fundamental: a question of whether a public official’s associations and statements disqualify him from standing at the site where their loved ones were murdered by terrorists.
September 11, 2026, will mark a quarter-century since the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. The children who lost parents that day are now adults. The firefighters and police officers who survived have aged. The towers have been replaced by a memorial and a museum. But for the families, the wound has never fully closed, and the annual reading of 2,977 names remains the one moment each year when the nation pauses to acknowledge what was taken from them.
The families are not asking for a political litmus test. They are asking whether a man who appeared at the mosque of an imam tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, whose father wrote a book drawing moral equivalence between America and Al Qaeda, and who has shown reluctance to condemn slogans associated with violence against Jews belongs at the ceremony where their children’s, spouses’, and parents’ names are read aloud.
That question has grown sharper as the broader political landscape has shifted. Across the country, organized opposition campaigns targeting public figures over their associations and statements have become more common and more effective. The 9/11 families’ petition fits that mold, but with stakes that are uniquely personal and uniquely American.
The museum says it wants to keep politics out of the ceremony. The families say Mamdani’s presence would inject exactly the kind of politics the museum claims to reject, not partisan politics, but the politics of association with people and ideas that treat the attacks of September 11 as something less than what they were.
Whether the museum bends to the families’ plea or holds to its open-door precedent, one thing is already clear: the families who buried their dead at Ground Zero do not consider Zohran Mamdani a man who shares their grief.
When the names of 2,977 Americans are read aloud this September, the people who loved them deserve to know that everyone standing at that memorial earned the right to be there, not by holding office, but by honoring what was lost.
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